Crime

Nightmare on Elm Drive

Did Lyle and Erik Menendez murder their parents in their Beverly Hills mansion and then make taped confessions? The author talks to the mystery witness who says she heard everything, and uncovers the secrets that turned the Menendezes’ American dream into a fatal nightmare.

He told me the name of his street, which was every bit as prestigious as Elm Drive. I once lived in Beverly Hills and know the terrain well. His home was in the same general area as the house where Kitty and Jose Menendez had been gunned down seven months earlier in a fusillade of fourteen twelve-gauge-shotgun blasts—five to the head and body of the father, nine to the face and body of the mother—that left them virtually unrecognizable as human beings, according to eyewitness reports. The slaying was so violent that it was assumed at first to have been of Mafia origins—a hit, or Mob rubout, as it was called, even in The Wall Street Journal. The arrest of the two handsome, athletic Menendez sons after so many months of investigation had shocked an unshockable community.

“Did you ever know the Menendez brothers?” I asked the teenager.

“No,” he replied. They had gone to different schools. They were older. Lyle was twenty-two, Erik nineteen. In that age group, a few years makes an enormous difference.

“A terrible thing,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I heard the father was pretty rough on those kids.”

With that, our conversation was concluded.

Patricide is not an altogether new crime in the second echelon of Southland society. Nor is matricide. On March 24, 1983, twenty-year-old Michael Miller, the son of President Ronald Reagan’s personal lawyer, Roy Miller, raped and clubbed to death his mother, Marguerite. In a minimally publicized trial, from which the media and public was barred, Miller was found guilty of first-degree murder but was acquitted on the rape charge, presumably on the technicality that the rape had occurred after his mother was dead. The judge then ruled that young Miller, who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, was legally innocent of murder by reason of insanity. “Hallelujah,” muttered Michael Miller after the verdict. He was sent to Patton State Hospital, a mental institution in California.

On July 22, 1983, in a Sunset Boulevard mansion in Bel-Air, twenty-year-old Ricky Kyle shot his father, millionaire Henry Harrison Kyle, the president of Four Star International, a television-and-movie-production firm, in the back after awakening him in the middle of the night to tell him there was a prowler in the house. Several witnesses testified that Ricky had confided in them about a long-standing desire to kill his father, who was alleged to have been physically and mentally abusive to his son. The prosecution argued that Ricky was consumed with hatred for his father and greed for his fortune, and that, fearing that he was about to be disinherited, he plotted the ruse of the prowler. With the extraordinary leniency of the Southern California courts for first-time murders, young Kyle was sentenced to five years for the slaying. Expressing dismay with the verdict, Ricky’s mother told reporters she had hoped her son would be spared a prison term. “I think he has suffered enough,” she said. Ricky agreed. “I feel like I don’t deserve to go to prison,” he said.

And then there were the Woodman brothers, Stewart and Neil, accused of hiring two assassins to gun down their rich parents in Brentwood. Tried separately, Stewart was convicted of first-degree murder. To escape the death penalty, he incriminated his brother. Neil’s trial is about to start.

Further elaboration is not necessary; the point has been made. One other case, however, on a lesser social stratum but of equal importance, under the circumstances, should be mentioned: the Salvatierra murder, which received international attention. In 1986, Oscar Salvatierra, the Los Angeles–based executive of a newspaper called Philippine News, was shot while he was asleep in bed, after having received a death threat that was at first believed to be tied to the newspaper’s opposition to former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. Later, Arnel Salvatierra, his seventeen-year-old son, admitted sending the letter and killing his father. In court, Arnel Salvatierra’s lawyer convinced the jury that Arnel was the victim of a lifetime of physical and psychological abuse by his father. The lawyer, Leslie Abramson, who is considered to be the most brilliant Los Angeles defense lawyer for death-row cases, compared Arnel Salvatierra to the tragic Lisa Steinberg of New York, whose father, Joel Steinberg, had been convicted of murdering her after relentlessly abusing her. “What happens if the Lisa Steinbergs don’t die?” Abramson asked the jury. “What happens if they get older, and if the cumulative effect of all these years of abuse finally drives them over the edge, and Lisa Steinberg pulls a gun and kills Joel Steinberg?” Arnel Salvatierra, who had been charged with first-degree murder, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and placed on probation.

This story is relevant to the Menendez case in that the same Leslie Abramson is one-half of the team defending the affluent Menendez brothers. Her client is Erik Menendez, the younger brother. Gerald Chaleff, with whom she frequently teams, is representing Lyle. On an earlier, burglary case involving the brothers, Chaleff, who gained prominence in criminal law as the defender of the Hillside Strangler, represented Erik. It is rumored that Abramson and Chaleff are each being paid $700,000. Psychological abuse is a constant theme in articles written about the brothers, and will probably be the basis of the defense strategy when the case comes to trial. There are even whispers—shocker of shockers—of sexual abuse in the Menendez family.

Jose Enrique Menendez was an American success story. A Cuban émigré, was sent to the United States by his parents in 1960 at age fifteen to escape from Castro’s Cuba. His father, a onetime soccer star, and his mother, a former champion swimmer, stayed behind until their last properties were seized by Castro. Young Jose, who excelled in swimming, basketball, and soccer, won a swimming scholarship to Southern Illinois University, but he gave it up when he married Mary Louise Andersen, known as Kitty, at the age of nineteen and moved to New York. He earned a degree in accounting at Queens College in Flushing, New York, while working part-time as a dishwasher at the swank “21” Club in Manhattan, where, later, successful and prosperous, he would often dine. Then began a career of astonishing ascendancy which took him through Hertz, where he was in charge of car and commercial leasing, to the record division of RCA, where he signed such high-earning acts as Menudo, the Eurythmics, and Duran Duran. By this time he and Kitty had had two sons and settled down to a graceful life on a million-dollar estate in Princeton, New Jersey. The boys attended the exclusive Princeton Day School and, urged on by their father, began developing into first-rate tennis and soccer players. Their mother attended every match and game they played. When Jose clashed with a senior executive at RCA in 1986, after having been passed over for the executive vice presidency of RCA Records, he uprooted his family, much to the distress of Kitty, who loved her life and house in Princeton, and moved to Los Angeles. There he leapfrogged to I.V.E., International Video Entertainment, a video distributor which eventually became Live Entertainment, a division of the hugely successful Carolco Pictures, the company that produced the Rambo films of Sylvester Stallone as well as some of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action films. Jose Menendez’s success at Live Entertainment was dazzling. In 1986 the company lost $20 million; a year late, under Menendez, Live earned $8 million and in 1988 doubled that. “He was the perfect corporate executive,” I was told by one of his lieutenants. “He had an incredible dedication to business. He was focused, specific about what he wanted from business, very much in control. He believed that whatever had to be done should be done—with no heart, if necessary.”

The family lived at first in Calabasas, an upper-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, inland beyond Malibu, where they occupied one house while building a more spectacular one on thirteen acres with mountaintop views. Then, unexpectedly, almost overnight, the family abandoned Calabasas and moved to Beverly Hills, where Jose bought the house on Elm Drive, a six-bedroom Mediterranean-style house with a red tile roof, a courtyard, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a guesthouse. Built in 1927, rebuilt in 1974, the house had good credentials. It had previously been rented to Elton John. And Prince. And Hal Prince. And a Saudi prince, for $35,000 a month. Erik Menendez, the younger son, transferred from Calabasas High to Beverly Hills High, probably the most snobbish public school in America. Lyle was a student at Princeton University, fulfilling one of the many American dreams of his immigrant father.

They were the ideal family; everyone said so. “They were extraordinarily close-knit,” an executive of Live Entertainment told me. “It was one big happy family,” said John E. Mason, a friend and Live Entertainment director. They did things together. They telephoned one another several times a day, about tennis matches and girlfriends and the results of exams. They almost always had dinner together, which, in a community where most parents go to parties or screenings every night and leave the children to their own devices, is a rare thing. They talked about world events, as well as about what was happening in Jose’s business. On the day before the catastrophic event, a Saturday, they chartered a boat called Motion Picture Marine in Marina del Rey and spent the day together shark fishing, just the four of them.

On the evening of the following day, August 20, 1989, the seemingly idyllic world that Jose Menendez had created was shattered. With their kids at the movies in Century City, Jose and Kitty settled in for a comfortable evening of television and videos in the television room at the rear of their house. Jose was in shorts and a sweatshirt; Kitty was in a sweatshirt, jogging pants, and sneakers. They had dishes of strawberries and ice cream on the table in front of the sofa where they were sitting. Later, after everything happened, a neighbor would report hearing sounds like firecrackers coming from the house at about ten o’clock, but he took no notice. It wasn’t until a hysterical 911 call came in to the Beverly Hills police station around midnight that there was any indication that the sounds had not been made by firecrackers. The sons of the house, Lyle and Erik, having returned from the movies, where they said they saw Batman again after they couldn’t get into Licence to Kill because of the lines, drove in the gate at 722 North Elm Drive, parked their car in the courtyard, entered the house by the front door, and found their parents dead, sprawled on the floor and couch in the television room. In shock at the grisly sight, Lyle telephoned for help. “They shot and killed my parents!” he shrieked into the instrument. “I don’t know … I didn’t hear anything … I just came home. Erik! Shut up! Get away from them!”

Another neighbor said on television that she had seen one of the Menendez boys curled up in a ball on the lawn in front of their house and screaming in grief. “I have heard of very few murders that were more savage,” said Beverly Hills police chief Marvin Iannone. Dan Stewart, a retired police detective hired by the family to investigate the murders, gave the most graphic description of the sight in the television room. “I’ve seen a lot of homicides, but nothing quite that brutal. Blood, flesh, skulls. It would be hard to describe, especially Jose, as resembling a human that you would recognize. That’s how bad it was.” According to the autopsy report, one blast caused “explosive decapitation with evisceration of the brain” and “deformity of the face” to Jose Menendez. The first round of shots apparently struck Kitty in her chest, right arm, left hip, and left leg. Her murderers then reloaded and fired into her face, causing “multiple lacerations of the brain.” Her face was an unrecognizable pulp.

The prevalent theory in the days following the murders was that it had been a Mob hit. Erik Menendez went so far as to point the finger at Noel Bloom, a distributor of pornographic films and a former associate of the Bonanno organized-crime family, as a possible suspect. Erik told police and early reporters on the story that Bloom and his father had despised each other after a business deal turned sour. (When questioned, Bloom denied any involvement whatsoever.) Expressing fear that the Mob might be after them as well, the brothers moved from hotel to hotel in the aftermath of the murders. Marlene Mizzy, the front-desk supervisor at the Beverly Hills Hotel, said that Lyle arrived at the hotel without a reservation two days after the murders and asked for a two-bedroom suite. Not liking the suites that were available at such short notice, he went to another hotel.

Seven months later, after the boys were arrested, I visited the house on Elm Drive. It is deceptive in size, far larger than one would imagine from the outside. You enter a spacious hallway with a white marble floor and a skylight above. Ahead, to the right, is a stairway carpeted in pale green. Off the hallway on one side is an immense drawing room, forty feet in length. The lone piece of music on the grand piano was “American Pie,” by Don McLean. On the other side are a small paneled sitting room and a large dining room. At the far end of the hallway, in full view of the front door, is the television room, where Kitty and Jose spent their last evening together. On the back wall is a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, filled with books, many of them paperbacks, including all the American-history novels of Gore Vidal, Jose’s favorite author. On the top shelf of the bookcase were sixty tennis trophies—all first-place—that had been won over the years by Lyle and Erik.

Like a lot of houses of the movie nouveau riche still in their social and business rise, the grand exterior is not matched by a grand interior. When the Menendez family bought the house, it was handsomely furnished, and they could have bought the furniture from the former owner for an extra $350,000, but they declined. With the exception of some reproduction Chippendale chairs in the dining room, the house is appallingly furnished with second-rate pieces; either the high purchase price left nothing for interior decoration or there was just a lack of interest. In any case, your attention, once you are in the house, is not on the furniture. You are drawn, like a magnet, to the television room.

Trying to imagine what happened that night, I found it unlikely that the boys—if indeed it was the boys, and there is a very vocal contingent who believe it was not—would have come down the stairs with the guns, turned right, and entered the television room, facing their parents. Since Jose was hit point-blank in the back of the head, it seems far more likely that the killers entered the television room through the terrace doors behind the sofa on which Kitty and Jose were sitting, their backs to the doors, facing the television set. The killers would probably have unlocked the doors in advance. In every account of the murders, Kitty was said to have run toward the kitchen. This would suggest, assuming she was running away from her assailants, that they had entered from behind.

Every person who saw the death scene has described the blood, the guts, and the carnage in sick-making detail. The furniture I saw in that room was replacement furniture, rented after the murders from Antiquarian Traders in West Hollywood. The original blood-drenched furniture and Oriental carpet had been hauled away, never to be sat on or walked on again. It is not far-fetched to imagine that splatterings of blood and guts found their way onto the clothes and shoes of the killers, which would have necessitated a change of clothing and possibly a shower. There is no way the killers could have gone up the stairs, however; the blood on their shoes would have left tracks on the pale-green stair carpet. The lavatory beneath the stairs and adjacent to the television room does not have a shower. What probably happened is that the killers retreated out the same terrace doors they had entered, and went back to the guesthouse to shower and change into clothes they had left there. The guesthouse is a separate, two-story unit beyond the swimming pool and adjacent to the tennis court, with a sitting room, a bedroom, a full bath, and a two-car garage opening onto an alley.

There is also the possibility that the killers, knowing the carnage twelve-gauge-shotgun blasts would cause, wore boots, gloves, and overalls. In that event, they would have only had to discard the clothes and boots into a large garbage bag and make a dash for it. One of the most interesting aspects of the case is that the fourteen shell casings were picked up and removed. I have been told that such fastidiousness is out of character in a Mafia hit, where a speedy getaway is essential. There is a sense of leisurely time here, of people not in a hurry, not expecting anyone, when they delay their departure from a massacre to pick up the shell casings out of the bloody remains of their victims’ bodies. They almost certainly wore rubber gloves.

Then they had to get rid of the guns. The guns, as of this writing, have still not been found. We will come back to the guns. The car the killers left in was probably parked in the guesthouse garage; from there they could make their exit unobserved down the alley behind the house. Had they left out of the front gates onto Elm Drive, they would have risked being observed by neighbors or passersby. Between the time the killers left the house and the time the boys made the call to the police, the bloody clothes were probably disposed of.

On the day before the fishing trip on the Motion Picture Marine, Erik Menendez allegedly drove south to San Diego and purchased two Mossberg twelve-gauge shotguns in a Big 5 sporting-goods store, using for identification the stolen driver’s license of a young man named Donovan Goodreau. Under federal law, to purchase a weapon, an individual must fill out a 4473 form, which requires the buyer to provide his name, address, and signature, as well as an identification card with picture. Donovan Goodreau has subsequently said on television that he can prove he was in New York at the time of the gun purchase in San Diego. Goodreau had once roomed with Jamie Pisarcik, who was, and still is, Lyle Menendez’s girlfriend and stalwart supporter, visiting him daily in jail and attending his every court session. When Goodreau stopped rooming with Jamie, he moved into Lyle’s room at Princeton, which was against the rules, since he was not a student at the university. But then, Lyle had once kept a puppy in his room at Princeton, and having animals in the rooms was against the rules, too.

What has emerged most significantly in the year since the murders is that all was not what it seemed in the seemingly perfect Menendez household. There are people who will tell you that Jose was well liked. There are more people by far who will tell you that he was greatly disliked. Even despised. He had made enemies all along the way in his rise to the high middle of the entertainment industry, but everyone agrees that had he lived he would have gone right to the top. He did not have many personal friends, and he and Kitty were not involved in the party circuit of Beverly Hills. His life was family and business. I was told that at the memorial service in Los Angeles which preceded the funeral in Princeton most of the two hundred people who attended had a business rather than a personal relationship with him. Stung by the allegations that Jose had Mob connections in his business dealings at Live Entertainment, allegations that surfaced immediately after the murders, the company hired Warren Cowan, the famed public-relations man, to arrange the memorial service. His idea was to present Menendez as Jose the family man. He suggested starting a Jose Menendez scholarship fund, a suggestion that never came to fruition. It was also his idea to hold the memorial service in an auditorium at the Directors Guild in Hollywood, in order to show that Jose was a member of the entertainment community, although it is doubtful that Jose had ever been there. Two people from Live Entertainment gave glowing eulogies. Brian Andersen, Kitty’s brother, spoke lovingly about Kitty, and each son spoke reverently about his parents. One person leaving the service was heard to say, “The only word not used to describe Jose was ‘prick.’ ”

Although Jose spoke with a very slight accent, a business cohort described him to me as “very non-Hispanic.” He was once offended when he received a letter of congratulations for having achieved such a high place in the business world “for a Hispanic.” “He hated anyone who knew anything about his heritage,” the colleague said. On the other hand, there was part of Jose Menendez that secretly wanted to run for the U.S. Senate from Florida in order to free Cuba from the tyranny of Fidel Castro and make it a U.S. territory.

Kitty Menendez was another matter. You never hear a bad word about Kitty. Back in Princeton, people remember her on the tennis courts with affection. Those who knew her in the later years of her life felt affection too, but they also felt sorry for her. She was a deeply unhappy woman, and was becoming a pathetic one. Her husband was flagrantly unfaithful to her, and she was devastated by his infidelity. There has been much talk since the killings of Jose’s having had a mistress, but that mistress was by no means his first, although he was said to have had “fidelity in his infidelity” in that particular relationship. Kitty fought hard to hold her marriage together, but it is unlikely that Jose would ever have divorced her. An employee at Life Entertainment said, “Kitty called Jose at his office every thirty minutes, sometimes just to tell him what kind of pizza to bring home for supper. She was a dependent person. She wanted to go on his business trips with him. She had June Allyson looks. Very warm. She also had a history of drinking and pills.” Another business associate of Jose’s at Live said, “I knew Kitty at company dinners and cocktail parties. They used to say about Kitty that she was Jose with a wig. She was always very much at his side, part of his vision, dedicated to the cause, whatever the cause was.”

A more intimate picture of Kitty comes from Karen Lamm, one of the most highly publicized secondary characters in the Menendez saga. A beautiful former actress and model who was once wed to the late Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, Lamm is now a television producer, and she and her partner, Zev Braun, are developing a mini-series based on the Menendez case. Lamm is often presented as Kitty’s closest friend and confidante. However, friends of Erik and Lyle decry her claims of friendship with Kitty, asserting that the boys did not know her, and asking how she could have been such a great friend of Kitty’s if she was totally unknown to the sons.

Most newspaper accounts say that Karen Lamm and Kitty Menendez met in an aerobics class, but Lamm, who said she dislikes exercise classes, gave a different account of the beginning of their friendship. About a year before the murders, she was living with a film executive named Stuart Benjamin, who was a business acquaintance of Jose Menendez. Benjamin was a partner of the film director Taylor Hackford in a production company called New Vision Pictures, which Menendez was interested in acquiring as a subsidiary for Live Entertainment. During the negotiation period, Benjamin, with Lamm as his date, attended a dinner party at the Menendez house on Elm Drive. Lamm, who is an effusive and witty conversationalist, and Kitty spent much of the evening talking together. It was the beginning of a friendship that would blossom. Lamm described Kitty to me as being deeply unhappy over her husband’s philandering. She claims that Kitty had tried suicide on three occasions, the kind of at-home suicide attempts that are more cries for help than a longing for death. Kitty had once won a beauty contest and could still be pretty on occasion, but she had let her looks go, grown fat (her autopsy report described her as “fairly well-nourished” and gave her weight as 165), and dyed her hair an unbecoming blond color that did not suit her. Lamm suggested that she get back into shape, and took her to aerobics classes, as well as offering her advice on a darker hair color. During the year that followed, the two women became intimate friends, and Kitty confided in Lamm, not only about Jose’s infidelity but also about the many problems they were having with their sons.

Lamm said she met the boys three times, but never talked to them in the house on Elm Drive. She told me, “Those kids watched their mother become a doormat for their father. Jose lived through Lyle. Jose made Lyle white bread. He sent him to Princeton. He gave him all the things that were not available to him as an immigrant.” Lamm finally talked with Kitty’s sons at the memorial service at the Directors Guild. She was introduced to Lyle, who, in turn, introduced her to Erik as “Mom’s friend.” She said that Lyle had become Jose overnight. He radiated confidence and showed no emotion, “unless it was a convenient moment.” Erik, on the other hand, fell apart.

Over the previous two years, the handsome, athletic, and gifted Menendez sons had been getting into trouble. Although a great friend of the boys’ dismissed their scrapes as merely “rich kids’ sick jokes,” two event occurred in Calabasas, where the family lived before the move to Beverly Hills, that were to have momentous consequences for all the members of the family. The brothers got involved in two very serious criminal offenses, a burglary at the home of Michael Warren Ginsberg in Calabasas and grand theft at the home of John Richard List in Hidden Hills. In total, more than $100,000 in money and jewels was taken from the two houses—not an insignificant sum.

Jose dealt with his sons’ transgressions the way he would deal with any prickly business problem, said a business associate, by “minimizing the damage and going forward, fixing something that was broken without actually dealing with the problem.” He simply took over and solved it. The money and jewels were returned, and $11,000 in damages was paid. Since Erik was under-age, it was decided that he would take the fall for both brothers, thereby safeguarding Jose’s dream of having Lyle study at Princeton. Jose hired the criminal lawyer Gerald Chaleff to represent Erik—the same Gerald Chaleff who is now representing Lyle on the charge of murdering the man who once hired him to represent Erik on the burglary charge. Everything was solved to perfection. Erik got probation, no more. And compulsory counseling. And for that, Kitty asked her psychologist, Les Summerfield, to recommend someone her son could go to for the required number of hours ordered by the judge. Les Summerfield recommended a Beverly Hills psychologist named Jerome Oziel, who, like Gerald Chaleff, continues his role in the Menendez saga right up to present.

Prior to the thefts, Erik had made a friend at Calabasas High School who would also play a continuing part in the story. Craig Cignarelli, the son of a prominent executive in the television industry, is a Tom Cruise look-alike currently studying at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Craig was the captain of the Calabasas High School tennis team, and Erik, who had recently transferred from Princeton Day, was the No. 1 singles player on the team. One day, while playing a match together, they were taunted and spit at by two students from El Camino High School, a rival school in a less affluent neighborhood. Menendez and Cignarelli went out to the street to face their adversaries, and a fight started. Suddenly, a whole group of El Camino boys jumped out of cars and joined the fray. Erik and Craig were both badly beaten up. Erik’s jaw was broken, and Craig received severe damage to his ribs. The incident sparked a close friendship between the two, which would culminate in the co-writing of a movie script called Friends, in which a young man named Hamilton Cromwell murders his extremely rich parents for his inheritance. One of the most quoted passages from the screenplay comes from the mouth of Hamilton Cromwell, speaking about his father: “Sometimes he would tell me that I was not worthy to be his son. When he did that, it would make me strive harder … just so I could hear the world ‘I love you, son.’ … And I never heard those words.” To add to the awful irony, Kitty, the loving mother who could not do enough for her sons, typed the screenplay in which her own demise seems to have predicted. In the embarrassing aftermath of the burglaries, the family moved to the house on Elm Drive in Beverly Hills. Jose told people at Live Entertainment that he was upset by the drug activity in Calabasas and that the tires of his car had been slashed, but it is quite possible that these stories were a diversionary tactic, or smoke screen, created to cover the disgrace of his son’s criminal record.

A further setback for the family, also partly covered up, had occurred the previous winter, when Lyle was suspended from Princeton after one semester for cheating in Psychology 101. Taken before a disciplinary committee, he was told he could leave the university voluntarily or be expelled. He chose to leave. This was a grave blow to Jose, who loved to tell people that he had a son at Princeton. Again taking over, he tried to talk the authorities at Princeton into reinstating his son, but this time the pressure he applied did not work. The suspension lasted a year. In a typical reaction, Jose became more angry at the school than he was at his son. He urged Lyle to stay on in Princeton rather than return to Beverly Hills, so that he would not have to admit to anyone that Lyle had been kicked out.

But Lyle did return, and worked briefly for Live Entertainment, where he showed all the worst qualities of the spoiled rich boy holding down a grace-and-favor job in his father’s company. He was consistently late for work. His attention span was brief. He worked short hours, leaving in the afternoon to play tennis. He was unpopular with the career-oriented staff. “The kids had a sense of being young royalty,” said an employee of the company. “They could be nasty, arrogant, and self-centered.” But, the same person said, Jose had a blind spot about his sons. And tennis held the family together. Once, Jose took the Concorde to Europe just to watch Lyle play in a tennis tournament, and then came right back. However, for all the seeming closeness of the family, the sons were proving to be disappointments, even failures, in the eyes of their perfection-demanding father. Jose had apparently come to the end of financing his recalcitrant sons’ rebellion, and there are indications that he planned to revise his will.

After the Calabasas debacle, Erik transferred to Beverly Hills High School for his senior year. His classmates remembered him chiefly as a loner, walking around in tennis shorts, always carrying his tennis racket.

“A girl I was going out with lusted after him,” a student told me. “She said he had good legs.”

“Was he spoiled?”

“Everyone at Beverly Hills High is spoiled.”

“Like his father, Lyle is said to have been a great ladies’ man, which pleased Jose, but several of Lyle’s girlfriends, mostly older than he, were not considered to be suitable by his parents, and clashes occurred. When Jose forbade Lyle to go to Europe with an older girlfriend, Lyle went anyway. A person extremely close to the family told me that another of Lyle’s girlfriends—not Jamie Pisarick, who has been so loyal to him during his incarceration—was “manipulating him,” which I took to mean manipulating him into marriage. This girl became pregnant. Jose, in his usual method of dealing with his sons’ problems, moved in and paid off the girl to abort the child. The manner of Jose’s interference in so personal a matter—not allowing Lyle to deal with his own problem—is said to have infuriated Lyle and caused a deep rift between father and son. Lyle moved out of the main house into the guesthouse at the back of the property. He was still living there at the time of the murders, although Erik continued to live in the main house.

Karen Lamm told me that in her final conversation with Kitty, three days before the killing and one day before the purchase of the guns in San Diego, Kitty told her that Lyle had been verbally abusive to her in a long, late-night call from the guesthouse to the main house.

From the beginning, the police were disinclined to buy the highly publicized Mafia-hit story, on the grounds that Mafia hits are rarely done in the home, that the victim is usually executed with a single shot to the back of the head, and that the wife is not usually killed also. The hit, if hit it was, looked more like a Columbian drug-lord hit, like the bloody massacre carried out by Al Pacino in the film Scarface, which, incidentally, was one of Lyle’s favorite movies.

Months later, after the arrests, the Beverly Hills police claimed to have been suspicious of the Menendez brothers from the beginning, even from the first night. One detective at the scene asked the boys if they had the ticket stubs from the film they said they had just seen in Century City. “When both parents are hit, our feeling is usually that the kids did it,” said a Beverly Hills police officer. Another officer declared, two days after the event, “These kids fried their parents. They cooked them.” But there was no proof, nothing to go on, merely gut reactions.

Inadvertently, the boys brought suspicion upon themselves. In the aftermath of the terrible event, close observers noted the extraordinary calm the boys exhibited, almost as if the murders had happened to another family. They were seen renting furniture at Antiquarian Traders to replace the furniture that had been replaced from the television room. And, as new heirs, they embarked on a spending spree that even the merriest widow, who had married for money, would have refrained from going on—for propriety’s sake, if nothing else—in the first flush of her mourning period. They bought and bought and bought. Estimates of their spending have gone as high as $700,000. Lyle bought a $60,000 Porsche 911 Carrera to replace the Alfa Ramero his father had given him. Erik turned in his Ford Mustang 5.0 hardtop and bought a tan Jeep Wrangler, which his girlfriend, Noelle Terelsky, is now driving. Lyle bought $40,000 worth of clothes and a $15,000 Rolex watch. Erik hired a $50,000-a-year tennis coach. Lyle decided to go into the restaurant business, and paid a reported $550,000 for a cafeteria-style eatery in Princeton which he renamed Mr. Buffalo’s, flying back and forth coast to coast on MGM Grand Air. “It was one of my mother’s delights that I pursue a small restaurant chain and serve healthy food with friendly service,” he said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian, the campus newspaper. Erik, less successful as an entrepreneur than Lyle, put up $40,000 for a rock concert at the Palladium, but got ripped off by a con-man partner and lost the entire amount. Erik decided not to attend U.C.L.A., which had been his father’s plan for him, but to pursue a career in tennis instead. After moving from hotel to hotel to elude the Mafia, who they claimed were watching them, the brothers leased adjoining condos in the tony Marina City Club Towers. “They liked high-tech surroundings, and they wanted to get out of the house,” one of their friends said to me. Then there was the ghoulish sense of humor another of their friends spoke about: sitting with a gang of pals one night, deciding what videos to rent for the evening, Erik suggested Dad and Parenthood. Even as close a friend as Glenn Stevens, who was in the car with Lyle when he was arrested, later told the Los Angeles Times that two days after the murders, when he asked Lyle how he was holding up emotionally, his friend replied, “I’ve been waiting so long to be in this position that the transition came easily.” The police were also aware that Lyle Menendez had hired a computer expert who eradicated from the hard disc of the family computer a revised will that Jose had been working on. Most remarkable of all was that, unlike the families of most homicide victims, the sons of Jose and Kitty Menendez did not have the obsessive interest in the police search for the killers of their parents that usually supersedes all else in the wake of such a tragedy.

As the C.E.O. of Live Entertainment, Jose Menendez earned a base pay of $500,000 a year, with a maximum bonus of $850,000, based on the company’s yearly earnings. On top of that, there were life-insurance policies. An interesting sidebar to the story concerns two policies that were thought to have been taken out on Menendez by Live Entertainment. The bigger of the two was a $15 million keyman policy; $10 million of that was with Bankers Trust and $5 million with Crédit Lyonnais. Taking out a keyman life-insurance policy on a top executive is common practice in business, with the company being named as beneficiary. Live Entertainment was also required to maintain a second policy on Menendez in the amount of $5 million, with the beneficiary to be named by him. Given the family’s much-talked-about closeness, it is not unlikely that Kitty and the boys were aware of this policy. Presumably, the beneficiary of the insurance policy would have been the same as the beneficiary of Jose’s will. In the will, it was stated that if Kitty died first everything would go to Jose, and if Jose died first everything would go to Kitty. In the event that both died, everything would go to the boys.

The murders happened on a Sunday night. On the afternoon of the following Tuesday, Lyle and Erik, accompanied by two uncles, Kitty’s brother Brian Andersen and Jose’s brother-in-law Carlos Baralt, who was the executor of Jose’s will, met with officials at Live Entertainment at the company’s headquarters to go over Jose’s financial situation. At that meeting, it became the difficult duty of Jose’s successor to inform the heirs that the $5 million policy with the beneficiaries named by Jose had not gone into effect, because Jose had failed to take the required physical examination, believing that the one he had taken for the $15 million policy applied to both policies. It did not. A person present at that meeting told me of the resounding silence that followed the reception of that information. To expect $5 million, payable upon death, and to find that it was not forthcoming, would be a crushing disappointment. Finally, Erik Menendez spoke. His voice was cold. “And the $15 million policy in favor of the company? Was that in order?” he asked. It was. Jose had apparently been told that he would have to take another physical for the second policy, but he had postponed it. As an officer of the company said to me, “That anything could ever happen to Jose never occurred to Jose.”

The news that the policy was invalid caused bad blood between the family and the company, especially since the immediate payment of the $15 million keyman policy gave Carolco one of its biggest quarters since the inception of the company. One of Jose’s former employees in New York, who was close enough to the family to warrant having a limousine sent to take him from a suburb of New York to the funeral in Princeton, said to me, “The grandmother? Did you talk to her? Did she tell you her theory? Did she tell you the company had Jose taken care of for the $15 million insurance policy?” The grandmother had not told me this, but it is a theory that the dwindling group of people who believe in the innocence of the Menendez boys cling to with passion. The same former employee continued, “Jose must have made a lot of money in California. I don’t know where all that money came from that I’ve been hearing about and reading about.”

Further bad feelings between the family and Live Entertainment have arisen over the house on Elm Drive, which, like the house in Calabasas, is heavily mortgaged: approximately $2 million is still owed on the Elm Drive house, with estimated payments of $225,000 a year, plus $40,000 a year in taxes and approximately $40,000 in maintenance. In addition, the house in Calabasas has been on the market for some time and remains unsold; $1.5 million is still owed on it. So, in effect, the expenses on the two houses are approximately $500,000 a year, a staggering amount for the two sons to have dealt with before their arrest. During the meeting on the Tuesday after the murders, when the boys were told that the $5 million life-insurance policy had not gone into effect, it was suggested that Live Entertainment might buy the house on Elm Drive from the estate, thereby removing the financial burden from the boys while the house was waiting to be resold. Furthermore, Live Entertainment was prepared to take less for the house than Jose had paid for it, knowing that houses where murders have taken place are hard sells, even in as inflated a real-estate market as Beverly Hills.

Ads have run in the real-estate section of the Los Angeles Times for the Elm Drive house. The asking price is $5.95 million. Surprisingly, a buyer did come along. The unidentified person offered only $4.5 million, a bargain for a house on that street, and the offer was hastily accepted. Later, however, the deal fell through. The purchaser was said to have been intimidated by the event that had occurred there, and worried about the reaction neighborhood children would have to his own children for living in the house.

The arrangement for Live Entertainment to purchase the property from the estate failed to go into effect, once the police investigation pointed more and more toward the boys, and so the estate has had to assume the immense cost of maintaining the properties. Recently, the Elm Drive house has been leased to a member of the Saudi Royal family—not the same prince who rented it before—for $50,000 a month to allay expenses.

Carolco, wishing to stifle rumors that Live Entertainment had Mob connections because of its acquisition of companies like Strawberries, an audio-video retailing chain, from Morris Levy, who allegedly has Genovese crime-family connections, and its bitter battle with Noel Bloom, hired the prestigious New York law firm of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman Hays & Handler to investigate the company for underworld ties. The 220-page report, which cynics in the industry mock as a whitewash, exonerated the company of any such involvement. The report was read at a board meeting on March 8, and the conclusion made clear that the Beverly Hills police, in their investigation of the Menendez murders, were increasingly focusing on the sons, not the Mob. An ironic bit of drama came at precisely that moment, when a vice president of the company burst in on the meeting with the news that Lyle Menendez had just been arrested.

Concurrently, in another, less fashionable area of the city known as Carthay Circle, an attractive thirty-seven-year-old woman named Judalon Rose Smyth, pronounced Smith, was living out her own drama in a complicated love affair with a married man who she says had told her he was divorcing his wife. Judalon Smyth’s lover was a Beverly Hills psychologist named Jerome Oziel, whom she called Jerry. Dr. Oziel was the same Dr. Oziel whom Kitty Menendez’s psychologist, Les Summerfield, had recommended to her a year earlier as the doctor for her troubled son, after the judge in the burglary case in Calabasas had ruled that Erik must have counseling while he was on probation. During that brief period of court-ordered therapy, Jerome Oziel had met the entire Menendez family. Judalon Smyth, however, was as unknown to Lyle and Erik as they were to her, and yet, seven months from the time of the double murder, she would be responsible for their arrest on the charge of killing their parents.

On March 8, Lyle Menendez was flagged down by more than a dozen heavily armed Beverly Hills policemen as he was leaving the house on Elm Drive in his brother’s Jeep Wrangler, accompanied by his former Princeton classmate Glenn Stevens. Lyle was made to lie on the street, in full view of his neighbors, while the police, with drawn guns, manacled his hands behind his back before taking him to the police station to book him for suspicion of murder. The arrest came as a complete surprise to Lyle, who had been playing chess, a game at which he excelled, until two the night before at the home of a friend in Beverly Hills.

Three days earlier, Judalon Smyth had contacted the police in Beverly Hills and told them of the existence of audiotapes in the Bedford Drive office of Dr. Oziel on which the Menendez brothers had allegedly confessed to the murders of their parents. She also told the police that the brothers had threatened to kill Oziel if he reported them. Lastly, she told them that the two twelve-gauge shotguns had been purchased at a sporting-goods store in San Diego. All of this information was unknown to the Beverly Hills police, after seven months of investigation. They obtained a subpoena to search all of Oziel’s locations. The tapes were found in a safe-deposit box in a bank on Ventura Boulevard.

Lyle’s arrest was reported almost immediately to the local Los Angeles newscasts. Among those who heard the news was Noel Nedli, a tennis-team friend from Beverly Hills High who was Erik Menendez’s roommate in a condominium that Erik was leasing for six months at the Marina City Club Towers, next to the condominium that his brother had leased with his girlfriend, Jamie Pisarcik. Erik was playing in a tennis tournament in Israel, where he had been for two weeks, accompanied by Mark Heffernan, his $50,000-a-year tennis coach. By a curious coincidence, Erik happened to telephone Nedli at almost the same moment Nedli was listening to the report of Lyle’s arrest on the radio. It was merely a routine checking-up-on-everything call, and Nedli realized at once that Erik did not know about Lyle’s arrest. He is reported to have said to Erik, “I hope you’re sitting down.” Then he said, “Lyle was just arrested.”

“Erik became hysterical. He was crying the whole nine yards,” said a friend of Nedli’s who had heard the story from him. This friend went on to say that the immediate problem for Erik was to get out of Israel before he was arrested there. Accompanied by Heffernan, who was not aware of the seriousness of the situation, the two got on a plane without incident, bound for London. There they split up. Heffernan returned to Los Angeles. Erik flew to Miami, where several members on the Menendez side of the family reside. An aunt advised him to return to Los Angeles and turn himself in. Erik notified police of his travel plans and gave himself up at Los Angeles International Airport, where he was taken into custody by four detectives. He was later booked at the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail on suspicion of murder and held without bond.

Judalon Smyth also told the Beverly Hills police that, at the request of Dr. Oziel, she had stood outside the door of his inner office and, unbeknownst to the Menendez brothers, listened to their confession and threats. She was to have called for help if any violence erupted.

Approximately a year before any of the above happened, Judalon Smyth told me, she telephoned Jerome Oziel’s clinic, the Phobia Institute of Beverly Hills, after having heard a series of tapes called Through the Briar Patch, which had impressed her. She was then thirty-six, had been married twice, and was desirous of having a relationship and a family, but she tended to choose the wrong kind of men, men who were controlling. The Briar Patch tapes, which she described to me as “quick-fix sort of stuff, not deep therapy,” told her she could break the pattern of picking the wrong kind of men in five minutes. After talking with Dr. Oziel on the telephone, she decided that his sessions, which cost anywhere from $150 to $250 for forty-five minutes, were too expensive for her. The most she could afford to pay was $60 a session. Oziel told her, “I would be the best for you, but if you’re not willing to pay that fee, I’ll find you someone else.”

She says he began telephoning her, and she found him very nice on the phone. She felt he seemed genuinely interested in her. He gave her three referrals to doctors in her price range, but she was never able to connect with any of them. Either they didn’t return her calls or they were away. After Oziel’s third call, she sent him a tape of love poems she had written and called Love Tears. She also told him she was in the tape-duplicating business. She found his calls were like therapy, and she began to tell him intimate things about herself, like the fact that she had been going to a professional matchmaker she had seen on television.

Smyth says that Oziel is a practitioner of Ericksonian hypnosis, a form of hypnosis that can be used on more than one person, devised by a psychiatrist named Milton Erickson. “Jim Jones used something similar. His word could hypnotize people.” Jim Jones, it should be recalled, talked 909 people into drinking poisoned Kool-Aid in Guyana in 1978. The method is called neurolinguistic programming. “Through vocal tones and key words, you can alter someone’s state of consciousness and receptivity. You think you are awake, but your mind is receptive. Jerry tried to put it into my head that I loved him.”

Smyth says Oziel would call her at eight p.m., and some of the calls would go on until midnight. He made her feel that he was what she needed. “I was falling in love over the phone,” she said. “You don’t think somone’s married when he calls you from home at night.”

She asked him if he had ever been in love. He said, “Only once, a long time ago.”

Finally she asked, “Are you married?”

He replied, “Not really.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m going through a divorce.”

He came to her house with two enormous bouquets.

“The minute I opened the door, I was relieved,” she said. “I wasn’t attracted to him. He was shorter than me, blond, balding, with a round face.” She told me she was attracted to men who looked like the actor Ken Wahl, or Tom Cruise. Oziel was forty-two at the time. “He kept trying to get physical right away. I said, ‘Look, you’re not my type. I’m not attracted to you.’ ” He said he just wanted a hug. “I said, ‘Just because you know all this intimate stuff about me doesn’t mean … ’ ”

On the second date, according to Smyth, Oziel said that his wife was getting a divorce but that she was still living in the house. Then he started calling Smyth every forty-five minutes, between his therapy sessions with patients. Her friends thought he was programming her. She says he threatened to remove himself from her life if they didn’t have sex.

“Finally I gave in. It was the worst sex I ever had in my life. To have good sex you either have to be in love or in lust. I wasn’t either. It was also awful the second time. The third time was better. I broke off with him four or five times between September and October. Then Erik Menendez came.”

Although Dr. Oziel had not seen any members of the Menendez family since Erik’s counseling had ended, when news of the murders was announced in August 1989, according to Smyth, he became consumed with excitement at his proximity to the tragedy. Judalon Smyth says that Erik had never actually completed the hours ordered by the court, but that the doctor signed him off as if he had, and the family paid. “It was basically a business deal,” said Smyth. However, after hearing about the double murder, Oziel became totally obsessed with the story, according to Smyth, and told her that the Menendezes were “the perfect family, the picture of happiness. Right away, he called the boys and offered his help.” He went to the house on Elm Drive and to the memorial service at the Director’s Guild, even though his relationship with the family had been minimal. “He interjected himself into their lives,” said Smyth. At the time, the boys were hiding out in hotels, saying they thought the Mafia was after them. “Jerry would go to where the boys were. He was advising them about attorneys for the will, etc. He had an I’ll-be-your-father attitude. In fact, Jerry and Jose were very much alike. Very controlling. Very domineering.”

At the end of October, Smyth told me, Oziel got a cal from Erik, who said he needed to talk with him. When Oziel hung up the telephone, he said to Smyth that he hoped it wasn’t what he feared it was going to be. “That was the first time Jerry indicated that he thought the boys had done it,” said Smyth. As a safety precaution, in case something went wrong, Oziel asked Smyth to come to the office after Erik arrived, pretending she was the next patient.

Erik came at four on the afternoon of Halloween, October 31, to the office at 435 North Bedford Drive. There is a small waiting room outside the office, with a table for magazines and several places to sit, but there is no receptionist. An arriving patient pushes a button with the name of the doctor he is there to see, and a light goes on in the inner office to let the doctor know that his next patient has arrived. Off the waiting room is a doorway that opens into a small inner hallway off which are three small offices. Oziel shares the space with several other doctors, one of them his wife, Dr. Laurel Oziel, the mother of his two daughters, but the doctors arrange their hours so as not to overlap, because the walls between the consultation rooms are extremely thin and voices can be heard from room to room.

Once there, Erik did not want to talk in the office, so he and Oziel went for a walk. On the walk, according to Smyth, Erik confessed that he and his brother had killed their parents. Lyle, who was at the Elm Drive house at the time, did not know that Erik was seeing Oziel for that purpose. Lyle did not know either that Erik had apparently also confessed to his good friend Craig Cignarelli, with whom he had written the screenplay called Friends.

When Smyth arrived at the office, Erik and Oziel had returned from their walk and were in the inner office. She pushed Oziel’s button to let him knew she was there.

According to Smyth, Oziel wanted Erik to tell Lyle that he had confessed to him. Erik did not want to do that. He said that he and Lyle were soon going to the Caribbean to get rid of the guns, put them into suitcases, and dump the bags in the Caribbean. On the night of the murders, the boys had hidden the two shotguns in the trunk of one of their parents’ cars in the garage. The police had searched only the cars in the courtyard in the front of the house, not the cars in the garage. Subsequently, the boys had buried the guns on Mulholland Drive. Smyth says Dr. Oziel convinced Erik that the boys would certainly be caught if they were carrying guns in their luggage. He also persuaded him to call Lyle and ask him to come to the office immediately.

It took ten minutes for Lyle to get to the office from the house on Elm Drive. Smyth says he did not know before he got there that Erik had confessed. When he walked into the waiting room, he picked up a magazine and chatted briefly with Smyth, assuming that she was another patient. “Been waiting long?” he asked her. He also pushed the button to indicate to Oziel that he had arrived. Oziel came out and asked Lyle to come in. When Lyle had passed him, Smyth says, Oziel indicated to her with a gesture that the door from the waiting room to the inner hallway was unlocked. In case anything went wrong, she would have access to the telephone to call for help.

Listening through the door to the doctor’s meeting with the boys, Smyth says, she heard Lyle become furious with Erik for having confessed. She told me he made threats to Oziel that they were going to kill him. “I never thought I believed in evil, but when I heard those boys speak, I did,” she said.

The particulars of the murders she is not allowed to discuss, because of an agreement with the Beverly Hills police, but occasionally, in our conversation, things would creep in. “They did go to the theater to buy the tickets,” she said one time. Or “The mother kept moving, which is why she was hit more.” Or “If they just killed the father, the mother would have inherited the money. So they had to kill her too.” Or “Lyle said he thought he committed the perfect murder, that his father would have had to congratulate him—for once, he couldn’t put him down.”

Frightened that she might be caught listening if the boys came out of the office, Smyth went back to the waiting room. Almost immediately, the door opened. “Erik came running out, crying. Then Lyle and Jerry came out. At the elevator, I heard Lyle threaten Jerry again. Erik had already gone down. Lyle and Jerry followed.” From a window in the office, Smyth could see Lyle and Oziel talking to Erik, who was in his Jeep on Bedford Drive.

When Oziel returned to the office, according to Smyth, he called several people connected with the board of ethics as well as some lawyers to see what his position was in terms of therapist-patient confidentiality. With Smyth listening, he presented the case of what he had just heard from the Menendez brothers in a hypothetical manner, without names. Smyth said he was told by each person he called that, since he was threatened, he was not bound by the rules of confidentiality.

According to Smyth, Erik knew, from his period of therapy with Oziel after the burglaries, where the doctor lived in Sherman Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. Fearing the boys might come after him, Oziel called his wife and told her to get the children and move out of the house. “Laurel and the kids went to stay with friends,” said Smyth. Oziel then moved into Smyth’s apartment, the ground floor of a two-family house in the Carthay Circle area of Los Angeles.

On the day after the boys confessed, Smyth says, Oziel warned her in a threatening manner not to tell anyone what she had heard. She has her own business, an audio-video duplicating service called Judalon Sound and Light, in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. Behind her shop, in which she also sells crystals, quartz, and greeting cards, there is a small office which she rents to two friends, Bruce and Grant, who also have a video-duplicating service. As self-protection, she told them that the Menendez boys had killed their parents. She also told her mother and father and her best friend, Donna.

Smyth claims that Oziel used the boys as a way of moving into her house and taking over her life. He bought a shotgun and brought it there for protection. He also bought a shotgun for his wife. Smyth said she asked him, “Why don’t we call the police?” Oziel replied that the boys owned the police. Then he set up another meeting with the boys. He told them on the second visit that everything they had told him was taped. He told them that copies of the tapes were in a safe-deposit box and also sealed in a lawyer’s office but that they would never be played unless something happened to him.

According to Smyth, the original confession, on October 31, was not taped. What was taped was Oziel’s documentation of everything that happened in that session and subsequent sessions with the boys, giving times and dates, telling about the confession and the threat on his life, “a log of what was happening during the time his life was in danger.” Smyth further contends that, as time went on, the relationship between the doctor and the boys grew more stable, and the doctor no longer felt threatened.

She said that Oziel convinced the boys “he was their ally—that if they were arrested he would be their only ally. He was the only one who knew they were abused children, who knew how horrible their home life was, who knew that Jose was a monster father, who knew that Kitty was an abused wife. He convinced them that if they had any hope of ever getting off they needed him.”

Meanwhile, the personal relationship between Smyth and Oziel deteriorated. At one point, she says, he had her hospitalized, claiming she had attempted suicide, then had her released into his custody. Then he moved her into his own house with his wife and children. According to Smyth, he told her, “I’ll make you out to be a total lunatic. I’ll make it look like Fatal Attraction.”

In a lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of the State of California by Judalon Rose Smyth against L. Jerome Oziel, Ph.D., on May 31, three months after the arrest of the Menendez brothers, it is charged that while Smyth was receiving psychiatric and psychological counseling from defendant Oziel he “improperly maintained Smyth on large dosages of drugs and, during said time periods, manipulated and took advantage of Smyth, controlled Smyth, and limited Smyth’s ability to care for herself … creating a belief in Smyth that she could not handle her affairs without the guidance of Oziel, and convincing Smyth that no other therapist could provide the insight and benefit to her life that Oziel could.” In the second cause of action in the suit, Smyth charges that on February 16, 1990, defendant Oziel “placed his hands around her throat attempting to choke her, and pulled her hair with great force. Subsequently, on the same day, Defendant Oziel forced Smyth to engage in an act of forcible and unconsented sexual intercourse.” Approximately three weeks after the alleged attack, Smyth contacted the police in Beverly Hills to inform them about the confession she said the Menendez brothers had made to Oziel.

Oziel’s lawyer, Bradley Brunon, called Smyth’s allegations “completely untrue,” and characterized her behavior as “an unfortunate real-life enactment of the scenario in Fatal Attraction.… She has twisted reality to the point where it is unrecognizable.”

‘The boys are adorable. They’re like two foundlings. You want to take them home with you,” said the defense attorney Leslie Abramson, who has saved a dozen people from death row. She was talking about the Menendez brothers. Leslie Abramson is Erik’s lawyer. Gerald Chaleff is Lyle’s.

“Leslie will fight to the grave for her clients,” I heard from reporters in Los Angeles who have followed her career. “When there is a murder rap, Leslie is the best in town.”

Abramson and Chaleff have worked together before. “We’re fifty-fifty, but she’s in charge,” Chaleff said in an interview. They like each other, and are friends in private life. Abramson met her present husband, Tim Rutten, an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, at a dinner party at Chaleff’s home.

During the arraignment in the Beverly Hills courthouse, I was struck by the glamour of the young Menendez brothers, whom I was seeing face-to-face for the first time. They entered the courtroom, heads held high, like leading actors in a television series. They walked like colts. Their clothes, if not by Armani himself, were by a designer heavily influenced by Armani, probably purchased in the brief period of their independent affluence, between the murders and their arrest. Their demeanor seemed remarkably lighthearted for people in the kind of trouble they were in, as they smiled dimpled smiles and laughed at the steady stream of Abramson’s jocular banter. Their two girlfriends, Jamie Pisarcik and Noelle Terelsky, were in the front row next to Erik’s tennis coach, Mark Heffernan. Everyone waved. Maria Menendez, the loyal grandmother, was also in the front row, and aunts and uncles and a probate lawyer were in the same section of the courtroom. Several times the boys turned around and flashed smiles at their pretty girlfriends.

They were told to rise. The judge, Judith Stein, spoke in a lugubrious, knell-like voice. The brothers smiled, almost smirked, as she read the charges. “You have been charged with multiple murder for financial gain, while lying in wait, with a loaded firearm, for which, if convicted, you could receive the death penalty. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty, Your Honor,” said Erik.

“Not guilty,” said Lyle.

Later I asked a friend of theirs who believes in their innocence why they were smiling.

“At the judge’s voice,” she replied.

Leslie Abramson’s curly blond hair bounces, Orphan Annie–style, when she walks and talks. She is funny. She is fearless. And she is tough. Oh, is she tough. She walked down the entire corridor of the Beverly Hills courthouse giving the middle finger to an NBC cameraman. “This what you want? You want that?” she said with an angry sneer into the camera, thrusting the finger at the lens, a shot that appeared on the NBC special Exposé, narrated by Tom Brokaw. Her passion for the welfare of the accused murderers she defends is legendary. She is considered one of the most merciless cross-examiners in the legal business, with a remarkable ability to degrade and confuse prosecution witnesses. “She loves to intimidate people,” I was told. “She thrives on it. She knows when she has you. She can twist and turn a witness’s memory like no one else can.’ John Gregory Dunne, in his 1987 novel, The Red White and Blue, based the character Leah Kaye, a left-leaning criminal-defense attorney, on Leslie Abramson.

“Why did you give the finger to the cameraman?” I asked her.

“I’ll tell you why,” she answered, bristling at the memory. “Because I was talking privately to a member of the Menendez family, and NBC turned the camera on, one inch from my face. I said, ‘Take that fucker out of my face.’ These people think they own the courthouse. They will go to any sleazoid end these days. So I said, ‘Is this what you want?’ That’s when I gave them the finger. Imagine, Tom Brokaw on a show like that.

“I do not understand the publicity of the case,” she continued, although of course she understood perfectly. “I mean, the president of the United States wasn’t shot.”

Before I could reply with such words as “patricide,” “matricide,” “wealth,” “Beverly Hills,” she had thought over what she had said. “Well, I rate murder cases different from the public.” Most of her cases are from less swell circumstances. In the Bob’s Big Boy case, the only death-penalty case she has ever lost, her clients herded nine employees and two customers into the restaurant’s walk-in freezer and fired shotguns into their bodies at close range. Three died and four were maimed. One of those who lived had part of her brain removed. Another lost an eye.

“What’s the mood of the boys?” I asked.

“I can’t comment on my clients,” she said. “All I can say is, they’re among the very best clients I’ve ever had, as far as relating. Both of them. It’s nonsense, all this talk that there’s a good brother and a bad brother. Lyle is wonderful. They’re both adorable.”

In the avalanche of media blitz that followed the arrest of the Menendez brothers, no one close to Lyle and Erik was the object of more intense fascination and scrutiny than Craig Cignarelli, Erik’s tennis partner, with whom he had written the screenplay Friends. A family spokesperson told me that in one day alone Craig Cignarelli received thirty-two calls from the media, including “one from Dan Rather, A Current Affair, Hard Copy, etc., etc. I can’t remember them all. We had to hire an attorney to field calls.” The spokesperson said that “from the beginning it was presumed that Craig knew something.”

Craig, clearly enjoying his moments of stardom following the arrests of his best friend and best friend’s brother, talked freely to the press and was, by all accounts of other friends of the brothers’, too talkative by far. In articles by Ron Soble and John Johnson in the Los Angeles Times, Craig said he was attracted to Erik by a shared sense that they were special. He recalled how they would drive out to Malibu late at night, park on a hilltop overlooking the ocean, and talk about their hopes for the future, about how much smarter they were than everyone else, and about how to commit the perfect crime. They had nicknames for each other: Craig was “King,” and Erik was “Shepherd.” “People really looked up to us. We have an aura of superiority,” he said.

As the months passed, it was whispered that Erik had confessed to the murders to Craig. This was borne out to me by Judalon Smyth. But he confessed them in an elliptical manner, according to Smyth, in a suppose-it-happened-like-this way, as if planning another screenplay. It was further said that Craig told the police about the confession, but there were not the hard facts on which to make an arrest, such as came later from Judalon Smyth.

Craig’s loquaciousness gave rise to many rumors about the two boys, as well as about the possibility that a second screenplay by them exists, one that parallels the murders even more closely. Craig has since been requested by the police not to speak to the press.

At one point, Cignarelli was presumed to be in danger because of what he knew, and was sent away by his family to a place known only to them. An ongoing story is that a relation of the Menendez brothers’ threatened Craig after hearing he had gone to the police. The spokesperson for Craig wanted me to make it clear that, contrary to rumors, Craig “never approached the police. The police approached Craig. At a point Craig decided to tell them what he knew.” When I asked this same spokesperson about the possibility of a second screenplay written by Craig and Erik, he said he had never seen one. He also said that the district attorney, Elliott Alhadeff, was satisfied that all the information on the confession tapes was known to Craig, so in the events that the tapes were ruled inadmissible by the court he would be able to supply the information on the stand.

Sometime last January, two months before the arrests, the friendship between the two boys cooled. That may have been because Erik suspected that Craig had talked to the police.

Earlier that month, during a New Year’s skiing vacation at Lake Tahoe, Erik had met and fallen in love with Noelle Terelsky, a pretty blonde student at the University of California in Santa Barbara from Cincinnati. The romance was instantaneous. “Erik’s not a hard guy to fall for,” said a friend of Noelle’s. “He is very sweet, very sexy, has a great body, and is an all-round great guy.” Noelle, together with Jamie Pisarcik, Lyle’s girlfriend, visits the brothers in jail every day, and has been present at every court appearance of the brothers since their arrest. Until recently, when the house on Elm Drive was rented to the member of the Saudi royal family, the two girls lived in the guesthouse, as the guests of Maria Menendez, the proud and passionate grandmother of Lyle and Erik, who believes completely in the innocence of her grandsons. Maria Menendez, Noelle, and Jamie are now living in the Menendezes’ Calabasas house, which has still not been sold.

Five months had passed since the arrest. Five months of hearings and deliberations to see whether the audiotapes of Dr. Jerome Oziel were admissible in the murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez. Police seizure of therapy tapes is rare, because ordinarily conversations between patients and therapists are secret. But there are occasional exceptions to the secrecy rule, one being that the therapist believes the patient is a serious threat to himself or others. Only the defense attorneys, who did not want the tapes to be heard, had been allowed to participate in the hearings. The prosecution, which did want them to be heard, was barred. Oziel had been on the stand in private hearings from which the family, the media, and the public were barred. Judalon Smyth had also been on the stand for two days in private sessions, being grilled by Leslie Abramson. The day of the decision had arrived.

There was great tension in the courtroom. Noelle and Jamie, the girlfriends, were there. And Maria, the grandmother. And an aunt from Miami. And a cousin. And the probate lawyer. And others.

Then the Menendez brothers walked in. The swagger, the smirks, the smiles were gone. And the glamour. So were the Armani-type suits. Their ever loyal grandmother had arrived with their clothes in suit bags, but the bags were returned to her by the bailiff. They appeared in V-necked, short-sleeved jailhouse blues with T-shirts underneath. Their tennis tans had long since faded. It was impossible not to notice the deterioration in the appearance of the boys, especially Erik. His eyes looked tormented, tortured, haunted. At his neck was a tiny gold cross. He nodded to Noelle Terelsky. He nodded to his grandmother. There were no smiles that day.

Leslie Abramson and Gerald Chaleff went to Judge James Albracht’s chambers to hear his ruling on the admissibility of the tapes before it was read to the court. The brothers sat alone at the defense table, stripped of their support system. “Everybody’s staring at us,” said Erik to the bailiff in a pleading voice, as if the bailiff could do something about it, but there was nothing the bailiff could do. Everybody did stare at them. Lyle leaned forward and whispered something to his brother.

The fierce demeanor of Leslie Abramson when she returned to the courtroom left no doubt that the judge’s ruling had not gone in favor of the defense. As the judge read his ruling to the crowded courtroom, Abramson, with her back to the judge, kept up a nonstop commentary in Erik Menendez’s ear.

“I have ruled that none of the communications are privileged,” said the judge. There was an audible sound of dismay from the Menendez family members. The tapes would be admissible. The judge found that psychologist Jerome Oziel had reasonable cause to believe that Lyle and Erik Menendez “constituted a threat, and it was necessary to disclose the communications to prevent a danger.” There was no doubt that this was a serious setback to the defense.

Abramson and Chaleff immediately announced at a news conference that they would appeal the judge’s ruling. Abramson called Oziel a gossip, a liar, and “less than credible.” Neither Judalon Smyth’s name or her role in the proceedings was ever mentioned.

A mere eight days later, in a stunning reversal of Judge Albracht’s ruling, the 2nd District Court of Appeals blocked the release of the tapes, to the undisguised delight of Abramson and Chaleff. Prosecutors were then given a date by which to file opposing arguments. Another complication occurred when Erik Menendez, from jail, refused to provide the prosecution with a handwriting sample to compare with the handwriting found on forms for the purchase of two shotguns in San Diego, despite a warning by the court that his refusal to do so could be used as evidence against him. In a further surprise, Deputy District Attorney Elliott Alhadeff, who won the original court ruling that the tapes would be admissible, was abruptly replaced on the notorious case by Deputy District Attorney Pamela Ferrero.

Since their arrest in March, Lyle and Erik Menendez have dwelt in the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, in the section reserved for prisoners awaiting trial in heavily publicized cases. The brothers’ cells are not side by side. They order reading material from Book Soup, the trendy Sunset Strip bookshop. Erik has been sent The Dead Zone, by Stephen King, and a book on chess. They have frequent visits from family members, and talk with one friend almost daily by telephone. That friend told me that they have to pay for protection in jail. “Other prisoners, who are tough, hate them—who they are, what they’ve been accused of. They’ve been threatened.” He also told me they feel they have lost every one of their friends. Late in August, when three razor blades were reportedly found in Erik’s possession, he was put in solitary confinement, deprived of visitors, books except for the Bible, telephone calls, and exercise. That same week, Lyle suddenly shaved his head.

Los Angeles district attorney Ira Reiner stated on television that one motive for the murders was greed. Certainly it is possibly for a child to kill his parents for money, to wish to continue the easy life on easy street without the encumbrance of parental restrictions. But is it really possible for a child to kill, for merely financial gain, in the manner Kitty and Jose Menendez were killed? To blast holes into one’s parents? To deface them? To obliterate them? In the fatal, coup de grâce shot, the barrel of one shotgun touched the cheek of Kitty Menendez. You wonder if her eyes met the eyes of her killer in that last second of her life. In this case, we have two children who allegedly participated in the killing of each parent, not in the heat of rage but in a carefully orchestrated scenario after a long gestation period. There is more than money involved here. There is a deep, deep hatred, a hatred that goes beyond hate.

The closest friend of the Menendez brothers, with whom I talked at length on the condition of anonymity, kept saying to me over and over, “It’s only the tip of the iceberg.” No amount of persuasion on my part could make him explain what the iceberg was. Months earlier, however, a person close to the situation mouthed but did not speak the word “incest” to me. Subsequently, a rich woman in Los Angeles told me that her bodyguard, a former cop, had heard from a friend of his on the Beverly Hills police force that Kitty Menendez had been shot in the vagina. At a Malibu barbecue, a film star said to me, “I heard the mother was shot up the wazoo.” There is, however, no indication of such a penetration in the autopsy report, which carefully delineates each of the ten wounds from the nine shots fired into Kitty Menendez’s body. But the subject continues to surface. Could it be possible that these boys were puppets of their father’s dark side? “They had sexual hatred for their parents,” one of the friends told me. This same person went on to say, “The tapes will show that Jose molested Lyle at a very young age.”

Is this true? Only the boys know. If it is, it could be the defense argument that will return them to their tennis court, swimming pool, and chess set, as inheritors of a $14 million estate that they could not have inherited if they had been found guilty. Karen Lamm, however, does not believe such a story, although it is unlikely that Kitty would have revealed to her a secret of that dimension. Judalon Smyth was also skeptical of this information when I brought up the subject of sexual abuse with her. She said she had heard nothing of that kind on Halloween afternoon when she listened outside Dr. Oziel’s office door as Lyle and Erik talked about the murders. Nor did Oziel, who she believes, discussed everything about the case with her, ever discuss sexual abuse. She said that last December, almost two months after the October 31 confession to Oziel, which was not taped, the boys, feeling that the police were beginning to suspect them, voluntarily made a tape in which they confessed to the crime. In it, they spoke of their remorse. In it, apparently, they told of psychological abuse. But sexual abuse? Judalon Smyth did not hear this tape, and by that time Dr. Oziel was no longer confiding in her.

Dominick Dunne is a best-selling author and special correspondent for Vanity Fair. His diary is a mainstay of the magazine.